Looking Up: Explore the summer Milky Way Band

Friday

Jul 30, 2010 at 12:01 AMJul 30, 2010 at 8:16 PM

As the moon fades to last quarter on Aug. 3, dark evening skies prevail giving us a deep window into the starry heavens. This time of year, the Milky Way Band is most prominent for evening watchers. If you have a good deal of light pollution in your sky, alas, the Milky Way will be difficult to distinguish. A sweep with binoculars or a small telescope, however, will reveal an abundant increase in stars as your scan takes you over this far away band of light.

Peter Becker

As the moon fades to last quarter on Aug. 3, dark evening skies prevail giving us a deep window into the starry heavens.

This time of year, the Milky Way Band is most prominent for evening watchers. If you have a good deal of light pollution in your sky, alas, the Milky Way will be difficult to distinguish. A sweep with binoculars or a small telescope, however, will reveal an abundant increase in stars as your scan takes you over this far away band of light.

As Galileo discovered with his telescope in 1609, the amazing Milky Way Band becomes resolved into practically innumerable stars, packed closely together. Stars and nebulous clouds of dust fill the spiral arms of our great galaxy, and it is these arms, overlapped and seen from within, that you are seeing.

If you perched yourself on a planet around a star in the Milky Way Band and looked this way, you would see the Milky Way Band from a whole different perspective - and this time, the sun would be one of those dim stars crowded in your magnified field of view.

Summer visitors to country retreats often come out from the cities for a chance at clean air, green, open spaces, blue lakes and starry skies. Camp children flock to summer camps in the area and are shown the wonders of the night sky, something they may never have seen in its glory if brought up in the inner city.

The summer evening Milky Way begins in the northeast where it is most dim and narrow, through the W-shaped constellation Cassiopeia and the constellation Cepheus. From there it quickly brightens and widens as it passes high up in the east, through the cross-shaped Cygnus the Swan.

Be sure to linger at the Swan. So high in the sky, even with moderate light pollution you may be able to see the faint, hazy light of the Milky Way here. This area teems with stars. From a dark country site, witness how majestic the sky is revealed here. At the Swan, the Milky Way begins to rent into two parallel streams as it arcs down to the south-southeast.

This stellar wonder is not a gap in the Milky Way as was once supposed. Instead, you are seeing the silhouette of dark nebulosity, vast dust clouds not reflecting any starlight and covering the sheen of Milky Way stars behind it. As much as you try and keep the dust bunnies at bay, dust is everywhere, filling our galaxy and galaxies throughout this universe.

The Milky Way broadens as it reaches the south-southeast of the summer evening, for a good reason. It is in this direction, towards the constellation Sagittarius the Archer, that we see the central hub of this grand spiral galaxy where we live.

You need to see this from a a dark country site, or out on the ocean, far south, where the Milky Way’s hub is high up. From mid-northern United States, we see the hub low near the horizon where our own atmospheric haze and glare interferes.

Note how the brighter stars of Sagittarius seem to trace a teapot. Amazingly, you can see how the clumps of the Milky Way seem to rise from this starry spout, like clouds of steam.

To the right is the bright constellation Scorpius the Scorpion, with its bright red star, Antares. A telescope will reveal many celestial treasures in the Sagittarius-Scorpius region, including star clusters and patches of nebulae.